Blog

We Need to Fix This Now

If we do not intervene now in intentional and effective ways to help every child being born to every group in our country get the right support in the first months and first years of life, we will damage ourselves badly as a country.

We have massive learning gaps in our schools, and those gaps are getting
worse because we have growing numbers of children being born into the low end
of those gaps, and their lives will be damaged in permanent ways by not being
able to do basic things that need to be done for both employment and education.

The majority of students in far too many schools cannot read or do
computations at grade level in high school, and the number of students who are
on the low end of those learning gaps is growing at a very dangerous rate.

We tend to want to avoid looking at those issues or even thinking
about those issues, but the sad truth is that we will condemn and doom
ourselves to be a country with a future of significant functional failure,
dysfunctional, damaging and divisive inter group interactions, destructive and sometimes
situationally crippling inter group divisions, and far too many levels of deep
seated and deeply embedded inter group conflict and anger unless we intervene
now in very doable ways to change that future for us as a country.

The majority of births in America in 2019 will be in our Medicaid
program. That fact gives us a very good set of tools that we can use relatively
quickly and directly to change life trajectories for many children — but that
will not happen unless we all understand the tools and make the official and
collective decision now to use them as soon as possible to help our children.

We have children who are being unintentionally and individually damaged
by the millions in ways that will ensure that they have extremely difficult
lives and who will often be angry as adults at the situations they will face
relative to their own health, economic status, and rates of both unemployment
and incarceration.

That set of realities will exacerbate the economic differences and
disparities that we see in many settings across the country, and increasing
those differences will cause us to become a nation at war with itself in some
key areas and key ways.

We should decide as a nation not to allow that negative and
damaging future to happen.

We need to help all children from all groups now in the first
weeks, first months, and first years of their lives to avoid having that future
define us as a nation.

If we do not help all of our children in that period of their
lives, the grim reality will be that we will have a negative future as a nation
at multiple levels because we will have significantly growing numbers of
children at who are at the low end of the learning gaps in our schools and it
is inevitable that those levels of learning difficulty and even learning
impairment will handicap and damage large numbers of people for their entire
lives.

Very real people are being damaged in very real ways — and the
problem is getting worse.

The learning gaps in reading and doing computations in our schools
have actually gotten worse for us as a country over the past three decades, and
those gaps are at extremely dangerous and damaging levels today.

They have gotten worse for us as a country because we now have
twice as many children who are being born into the low end of those gaps. We
have a shrinking minority of our total students who can now perform at grade
levels in our schools.

We are now in the position in many communities where fewer than 30
percent of the students can perform at the levels that are needed for them to
do well in major areas of their lives, and we have a growing number of schools
and communities where those numbers of students who can perform at basic and
appropriate levels are under 15 percent.

There is no possible way for us to afford significant future damage
in those communities that only have 15 percent of the students performing at
those basic levels.

We need to stop pretending that those issues do not exist today.

That is a very serious set of problems — and we need to stop
ignoring it as a society and as a nation.

We need to be very honest with ourselves.

The children who are significantly behind in those key learning areas
at that point in their lives will have difficulty succeeding in far too many
areas of their lives. Many of those children, as adults, will have and will express
significant inter group anger because of the obstacles they face in their
lives.

Having a majority of our students on a path to significant inter
group conflict and to very real and dangerous inter group anger is not a good
thing if we want a future where all of our grandchildren will prosper and where
all of our grandchildren will be safe and thrive.

We are not doomed to have that future become our reality.

We have choices and we have opportunities.

That future of inter group conflict and large-scale learning
deficiencies for millions of children does not need to happen.

We actually know what to do to keep that from happening and to
actually give us a very positive, safe, and successful future as communities
and as a country.

We can give every child from every group the right support and the
right interactions in the first weeks, months, and years of life to do well in
school and we can eliminate those inter group disparities in our schools and that
will significantly help reduce those damaging disparities in other areas of our
lives.

We actually finally do know what to do to make those gaps
disappear. We have become a lot smarter about those issues and processes over
the last few years.

We do not have to guess about how to deal with those sets of
issues for all of those children. We now have a science-based answer for that
set of problems. Extremely useful and powerful biological and medical science
about the first months and first years of life for each child now tells us what
we need to do to eliminate those gaps and disparities for our children.
We know what to do to
succeed in those areas, and we can and should apply that knowledge to help
every child.

If we do not intervene now in intentional and effective ways to
help every child being born to every group in our country get the right support
in the first months and first years of life, we will condemn and doom ourselves
to be a country with a future of significant functional failure, dysfunctional,
damaging and divisive inter group interactions, destructive and sometimes situationally
crippling inter group divisions, and far too many levels of deep seated and deeply
embedded inter group conflict and anger.

The inter group disparity and conflict issues that we face today are
immediate and very real, and they are being exacerbated and perpetuated by the
damage we are inflicting on far too many of our children.

We have children who are being unintentionally and individually damaged
by the millions in ways that will ensure that they have extremely difficult
lives and who will often be angry as adults at the situations they will face
relative to their own health, economic status, and rates of both unemployment
and incarceration.

We should decide as a nation not to allow that negative and
damaging future to happen.

We need to help all children from all groups now in the first
weeks, first months, and first years of their lives to avoid having that future
define us as a nation.

If we do not help all of our children in that period of their
lives, the grim reality will be that we will have a negative future as a nation
at multiple levels because we will have significantly growing numbers of
children at who are at the low end of the learning gaps in our schools and it
is inevitable that those levels of learning difficulty and even learning
impairment will handicap and damage large numbers of people for their entire
lives.

Very real people are being damaged in very real ways — and the
problem is getting worse.

The learning gaps in reading and doing computations in our schools
have actually gotten worse for us as a country over the past three decades, and
those gaps are at extremely dangerous and damaging levels today.

They have gotten worse for us as a country because we now have
twice as many children who are being born into the low end of those gaps. We
have a shrinking minority of our total students who can now perform at grade
levels in our schools. We are in the position in many communities where fewer
than 30 percent of the students can perform at the levels that are needed for
them to do well in major areas of their lives, and we have a growing number of
schools and communities where those numbers of students who can perform at
basic and appropriate levels are under 15 percent.

That is a very serious problem — and we need to stop ignoring it
as a society and as a nation.

The children who are significantly behind in those key learning areas
at that point in their lives will have difficulty succeeding in far too many
areas of their lives. Many of those children, as adults, will have and will express
significant inter group anger because of the obstacles they face in their
lives.

Having a majority of our students on a path to significant inter
group conflict and to very real and dangerous inter group anger is not a good
thing if we want a future where all of our grandchildren will prosper and where
all of our grandchildren will be safe and thrive.

That future of inter group conflict and large-scale learning
deficiencies for millions of children does not need to happen.

We can give every child from every group the right support and the
right interactions in the first weeks, months, and years of life to do well in
school and we can eliminate those inter group disparities in our schools and that
will significantly help reduce those damaging disparities in other areas of our
lives.

We actually do know what to do. We do not have to guess about how
to deal with those sets of issues for all of those children. We now have a
science-based answer for that set of problems. Extremely useful and powerful
biological and medical science about the first months and first years of life
for each child now tells us what we need to do to eliminate those gaps and
disparities for our children.

We know what to do to succeed in those areas, and we can and
should apply that knowledge to help every child.

The Neuron Connectivity Timeframes Are the
Same for Every Child from Every Group and We All Need to Understand That
Process and That Timeframe

The science is clear and it can and should be extremely useful for
every child.

The biological processes and the timeframes that strengthen brains
and that physically connect neurons in the brain for each child are the same
for every child from every group.

The neurons connect in the brain of every child in the first
weeks, months, and years of life. That basic process starts immediately for
every child. It involves direct interactions with adults for each child. Each
of the children from every group who has one or more adults directly
interacting with them in those very first timeframes build billions and even
trillions of neuron connections that will support each child for life.

However, the children from every group who do not have the direct
and individual interactions with adults that build those connections in those
first weeks, months and years of life simply do not have those billions of
neuron connections in their brains. The children who do not have those billions
of neuron linkages made in those early days of their lives are on an entirely
different life trajectory for learning, education, behavior, and even physical
health.

We need to be extremely honest with ourselves about that process
and about how we can use it to help every child from every group in America.

One very sad, grim, problematic and extremely important thing about
that process that we all need to clearly understand from the new science is
that the brains of all children from all groups also change just before age
four. Purging starts just before age four. The brains of our children from
every group actually go through a purging process to eliminate many of the unused
connections in their brain at that point in time.

Building great brain strength and building very high levels of
powerful neuron connectivity is easy to do for children from every group in the
very first years of life — and it is much more difficult to do for children
from every group after age four.

That time frame is why three decades of very well-meaning, well
intentioned, and even sometimes well-funded efforts to close the learning gaps
in our schools that have all started with the kindergarten years or with the
first grade in our schools as the first intentional and first functional and
official education support and learning improvement level timeframes for our
children have simply failed.

We know from our national data that we have not closed those
significant learning gaps in American schools for three decades — and we now
know that we have failed because we have tried to close those gaps for children
in all of those settings at 15 years for each child — and we actually must
close the gaps at 15 months for each child to make them go away.

That is entirely possible to do.

The actual opportunities for building neuron connections by the
billions are huge for the children from every group, and building neuron
connections makes learning gaps go away for our children.

The brains of children from every group and from every economic
status are very open to massive growth and neuron connectivity in the first
weeks, months, and years of life.

That direct opportunity reality for each child and for every group
of children is not racial or ethnic or even economic. It is purely experiential
at an extremely individual and direct and personal level for each child.

All of the reports that seem to show and demonstrate learning
differences by group are both misleading and wrong, because the learning
ability is created on an individual basis for each child — and it is not a
group process or a group measurement at any level.

What we do in those first weeks, first months, and first years for
each child sets up the learning reality for each child — and we now know that
we can do the right things for children from every group in that time frame to
have a positive impact on learning readiness levels for each child.

It is important to understand that it is not a group process.

It could not be more direct or more individual. The learning gaps
that are reported now actually measure the average abilities of individuals in
each setting and they are not any kind of group performance that relates in any
way to the actual or inherent capabilities of any group as a group.

We know, in each setting, that the learning levels that exist at
age 15 are a direct and linear extension of the learning readiness levels that
existed for those same children when they were four years old. Multiple studies
have shown that the children who are learning ready at age four tend to do well
in their later school years, and the children who have fallen behind as early
as two years in all of those settings tend not to catch up later.

Learning readiness at age four measurements basically reflect the current
neuron connectivity process and status for each individual child that was
created by the direct and personal interactions each child had in those first
years of life before that measure was taken.

That information tells us that we need to make having our children
all learning ready by age four a top priority in each community and setting, or
we will never be able to close those gaps in our schools.

When we all understand that entire process, and when we all know
what neuron connectivity building does for all of our children — then one very
clear commitment that we need to make is to help each of the children who are
functionally not learning ready at that early age and who fall behind from that
point on in their lives as a result of not being ready at age four.

We should not ever give up on any child.

Now that we understand this process and these timeframes better,
we need our schools to learn to be even better at providing support and
encouragement to all of the children who have fallen behind and who did not get
those billions of connected neurons in those early timeframes.

We need to provide the best possible education for every child
regardless of their learning status, and we can do that more effectively when
we understand and address the specific difficulties that are faced by each of
the children who were personally not learning ready by age four or when they actually
arrived at school.

We need to reduce that number of students who are not learning
ready at age four from the high and damaging levels we see today. Now that we
understand what is creating all of those problems in all of our schools, we need
to do the right things in each of our settings and in each of our communities
to make sure the vast majority of our children actually are learning ready at
that key point in time. We should also help the children who have fallen behind
to get the best education they can get from that time forward given their own situation
and their own levels of ability in those areas.

We clearly should begin today to help every child who is born or
who is nearly born to have the best possible start relative to those
interactions and those personal neuron connection experiences, so that when
they each get to school, they are each ready and able to learn.

We know what to do — and we know how to do it.

As a nation — and as both families and communities — we need to
change the way we think about those very first years and we need to put in
place plans and approaches and tools to help every child be ready to learn at
that key point in time for their lives.

No other approach or strategy — other than having more children who
are each learning ready by age four — has any functional chance of closing the massive
learning gaps we have in our schools.

Biology rules.

Biology makes every other strategy fail.

The pure and basic biology that creates those neuron connections
in that key time frame is universal for all sets of children from every group.
Our new biology process awareness and understanding gives us both a great tool now
and great wisdom and insight as well about why our prior efforts to close those
gaps in all of our schools have failed for three sad, painful, often well
intentioned, but clearly internally damaging decades since we have been
measuring the gaps.

Wishful thinking, magical thinking, general good intentions and even
the most sincere and earnest good will in any setting will sadly will not work
at this point in our history to make those gaps disappear.

We need an actual plan to close those gaps.

We need to create a basic plan as communities and as a country to
make the right level of learning readiness at age four for all of our children happen,
so that we will not have those learning gaps for the older children in our
schools a decade from now.

We have no plans as a nation to deal with either that opportunity
or that threat today.

That failure to deal with those issues to help every child
functionally and directly in those key timeframes for each child dooms millions
of children and it puts us on a dangerous path as a nation to be a nation at
war with itself in very damaging ways.

Every child who is being born right now is going to have the
trajectory of their lives created by what happens in those first months and
years — and we need to act now and well to help every child from every group be
on the best possible path for their lives.

We need to be very honest with ourselves about the choices we need
to make now to help children from every group.

If we do not choose to help every child — and if we do not step
forward to help all children from all groups now in those key times in their
lives — we will fall away from what should and could have been a glorious and
successful future for us as a nation and we will end up as a sad and badly
damaged country where our own children and our grandchildren will be deeply
divided and where a high percentage of our grandchildren will have a high
likelihood of living lives where they will need to protect themselves from each
other to survive.

When we have communities where far too many people are
unemployable and cannot read, and where we will have far too many people in
prison because they have no other source of income other than gangs and crime,
then those communities will be dangerous and unsafe settings for everyone.

We need to be honest with ourselves about how serious this problem
is becoming.

Both the percentage of children and the actual number of our
children who are being born now who will be on the low end of these learning gaps
in our schools is growing significantly to actually be a majority of our total
births.

Many Communities Are in Trouble Now

That is the reality we need to face.

We have actually tended to pretend as a society, that those
numbers do not exist.

An unfortunate but emotionally and psychologically seductive and
powerful blend of political correctness, scientific ignorance, collective and
individual political cowardice, magical thinking, emotionally guided and
reinforced prejudice-linked group thinking, and pure and often very innocent,
naïve, wishful and hopeful thinking about those processes has kept us from
dealing with those issues in real, open and effective ways in any of our communities,
schools, or settings — and many of our communities are in major trouble today because
of that failure to look at those issues and to deal with them in the past in
those settings.

Ignorance has unfortunately anchored that process and that agenda.

Ignorance has been a major part of the problem because too many key
people in each of our communities have actually simply not known or understood the
foundational brain science that sets up the context for those gaps for our
children in all of those communities and those schools.

Ask the experts in those areas and settings about the direct and
linear impact of biological and physical neuron connections in our children on either
group economics or on sociological factors in our communities or on overall
education development and performance in our schools, and an extremely high
percentage of the experts in each of those areas will not have a clue about why
you are even asking the question.

When key people in key thought leader functions and areas do not
know or understand the current science of developing brains for children, then
building solutions and creating functional remediations for actual inter group
differences will not happen in those key areas, and increasing and improving early
child brain support processes and tools for all children from all groups has
not been part of their thought process or their solution set for the economic,
social, health, and political disparities and challenges that those experts and
thought leaders work on and cite all the time as areas where we can and should
create a better future for ourselves as communities and as a nation.

Ignorance on that particular process by key people has been
supplemented, enhanced, reinforced and even exacerbated by very real political
cowardice for some people in some settings.

Too many people have willfully and intentionally avoided recognizing,
noting, citing, mentioning, outlining, or even discussing either the learning
gap numbers or the education system related issues and disparities for our
children because some key people in those settings have been afraid of the
potential political consequences and potential backlash of recognizing and
acknowledging either personally or publicly that those significant learning
levels gaps by group actually exist.

Some people who should have been addressing those issues have made
the political decision to avoid looking at or addressing the real learning gap numbers
in too many of those communities — even when those gaps have been reported publicly
and even when they are obvious to anyone looking to see what they actually are
in any setting.

That political decision by many people to both duck and avoid the
issue is understandable and explainable when there has not been a clear
understanding on the part of those leaders or the community of why those gaps
exist and when there has not been a sense or awareness of what might actually be
done in a functional way to prevent them in the future.

The news media has not helped. The news media in multiple settings
have written and presented multiple reports about those gaps each year when
they are reported by the schools with almost no sense or understanding by any
of the key media people about how significant and important those gaps are or
what should be done to either fix and prevent them.

So the reality we face is that far too many people across all
spectrums of our community who have seen the data about the major learning gaps
in all of those schools have either not understood how serious those numbers
are or have not understood why they exist or have not had the political courage
or practical insight and functional wisdom to either talk about the problems in
clear and understandable ways or to actually do any things to deal with those
problems in effective ways.

The Institute of Medicine did a wonderful piece more than a decade ago called, From Neurons to Neighborhoods that clearly described the key issues, and our news media, health care infrastructure, political leadership, economists, and other academics have all managed to ignore what it told us and not understand how important these issues are.

A small number of economists — including Nobel Laureate James Heckman at the University of Chicago, Aaron Sojourner at The University of Minnesota, and Katharine B. Stevens at the American Enterprise Institute — have written about these opportunities and issues as well, and their findings have been ignored by their peers to a painful degree.

Many economists write about issues like earning disparities and
health care disparities and even incarceration level disparities, and are
completely ignorant of the absolutely foundational linkage and relationship
that exists between the neurons that connect in the first two years of life for
each child and all of those very significant disparities in all of those other
areas of their lives.

We Need to Solve Those Issues — Not Avoid Them

We need to have everyone relevant to those issues to understand
those processes and the impacts that they have on our communities and people.

We need to change our old approach to the learning gap problem,
and we need to change our approach now by using basic science to create context
for our leaders and academics in all related fields, and by having people from
all of those fields to use that information to guide both their thinking and
what we do as communities and as a nation.

We need everyone to understand the problem and the process, and we
need everyone to use that information to help our children.

We need to start by looking very directly and honestly at the
actual learning gap data from communities across our country and we need all of
the key people in each setting to recognize that we need to intervene now to
help fix and address those problems in each of the settings where they exist.

In Baltimore, the percent of students who can read at grade level is only 13 percent.

Detroit also has about 15 percent of the students in many of their
schools able to read at grade level, and Cleveland has major problems that have
been getting worse for years.

The Cleveland PlainDealer did a report on the differences in their schools that referenced an important study done by Stanford of school systems across the country.

California has equivalent gap related numbers and learning problems.

Latino children will make up more than half of the births in that state this year. Only 17 percent of the Hispanic children in California schools statewide scored at proficient levels in math and only 26 percent of those California students were proficient in English.

Multiple other communities and an extremely broad array of school
systems around the country have the same kinds of results and gaps and we need
to look with courage and integrity at each of those gaps and understand both
why they exist in each setting and what can be done in each setting to help
them disappear.

Berkeley and Stanford Have Both Looked at Why
Those Gaps Exist

Some highly credible academic settings have done some very
important research into those learning level gaps and early interaction issues
that helps to teach us what causes those gaps to happen early in the lives of
our children and what we need to do to make those gaps disappear everywhere.

Those researchers at Berkeley showed that the families of Hispanic
children in California had great initial interactions with the children. They
reported that the Hispanic children were actually ahead of the other children
in learning readiness at nine months but then those same children were, on
average, significantly behind the rest of the population at 24 months.

The researchers found that the children who were behind at that very
early point in their lives stayed behind for the rest of their education
process. We now know that “early falling behind” reality for those children at
24 months set up the major learning gaps we see in all of the communities and schools
for Hispanic children in California.

There were clearly some basic factors that created different
trajectories for the children in that study. That information about some of
those factors was important to discover and understand. Reading to children had
an impact that needed to be measured and understood. That California research
showed that reading or not reading to Hispanic and non-Hispanic children was a
major differentiating factor between the families in the study.

The biggest single factor that differentiated the two sets of kids
studied by Berkeley in California was that the Hispanic families had a lower
level of reading to their children. Nearly 60 percent of the White mothers who
were studied read daily to their children but only 18 to 28 percent of the Mexican
American families read regularly to their children.

*Table 1 from that Berkeley
study is attached to the very end of this discussion.

In an echo of the Berkeley research, the children studied by
Stanford who had fallen behind before age two also did not catch up later with
the children who were exposed to more “child directed talk” and direct
interactions in their settings in those first years and in the other years of
their childhood.

Reading to children at the earliest possible age as part of a
direct interaction with trusted adults is strongly supported by the brain
science being produced by Harvard and the University of Washington, and UCLA
and Columbia, and the other great brain development programs who are trying to
figure out how to get the best start for all of our children. Interactions with
trusted adults are golden for children, and books create an interaction between
adults and children that can build billions of neuron connections for each
child and also create a warm and loving interaction that provides other levels
of emotional benefit for each child.

That information about the impact of reading is both an
opportunity and a problem for us as a country, because we now know that far too
many homes in our country do not have a single children’s book — and we know
that actual reading happens in high volumes for some children in those key time
frames and not at all for too many others in those same months and years.

Reading Has A Massive Impact on Neuron
Connections for Children

Ohio State University just did an extremely important study of families that looked at differences in the reading levels and the number of words spoken to children in different homes in the first five years of their lives.

The Ohio researchers offered extremely important context setting information
about the levels of neuron connecting activities for children that are
happening now in various homes in the earliest years of life by linking the
number of books read to each child and the total number of words that each
child heard before age five.

The Ohio researchers broke families into five groups: 1)
Nonreaders — people who never read books to their children, 2) People who read
one to two times a week, 3) People who read three to five times a week, 4)
People who read daily, and 5) People who read five or more books a day.

Their information about the number of homes we have that did not
read at all to their very young children was sobering — almost staggering. Those
very low numbers for reading to some children reinforced earlier information
that said that half of the Medicaid homes in America did not have a single
book.

The Ohio researchers estimated that about one in four families did
not read at all to their children and that another fourth of the families were
only read to once or twice a week.

They counted the number of words that each child would hear spoken
from both reading and related interactions before age five.

They estimated that the children who were read to every day would
hear 296,000 words spoken to them by age five — and they calculated that the
children who had no books read at all would only hear 4,662 words spoken to
them in those same key five years.

Under five thousand words is a very low number of words to hear — particularly
when we now know from the growing body of research at Harvard, Columbia and The
University of Washington, UCLA, and several other important and effective programs–
that neuron connections by the billions are either created or not created in
the brain of each child by the direct interactions with adults that happen with
each child in those first months and years.

That very large number of homes in our country that we now know
have only one book or that actually have no books at all explains why we have so
many school systems in our country where only 15 percent or 20 percent of the
children can read at grade level by age 15 today.

When slightly more than half of the homes have one book or less in
the entire country, we can work backwards in each community to assume that the
number of students who had heard enough spoken words to become personally learning
ready at age four in those settings was a very low number.

When you combine current science about neuron connections being
created by direct interactions between parents and children in those timeframes
with those very low numbers of spoken words, that explains why both the
Berkeley research and the Sonoma First Five research showed that the learning
readiness levels at kindergarten for the children in the families without books
was only 15 percent, and that the learning readiness levels for the children in
the homes with books was as high as 60 percent.

“Make the Right Thing Easy to Do”

We obviously need to teach that basic linkage between interactions
with children and the number of neuron connections in their brain that is
supported by the reading of books to children to all parents and to all
families from all groups and to every community — and we then need to do
effective things in all settings to get books to all children.

Getting books to children is a solution process that lends itself
to various creative implementation approaches by people in settings everywhere.

The increased levels of reading part of our solution set as a
country can be relatively easy to do. Books are cheap and both children and
parents love them, so getting books to families and children is obviously both
an easy and high opportunity thing for us to do in each setting to have a major
and almost immediate positive impact on children.

We do not need to wait 15 years in our communities to see if
reading helps children.

We can measure that success in three years or less in most
settings.

Changing that behavior
actually makes an immediate difference for our schools because it is much
easier at every level of teaching for schools when a higher percentage of the 5-year-olds
in their kindergartens are functionally ready to learn, and not headed for the
paths of both behavioral issues and learning difficulties.

Any public health agenda that makes the right thing easy to do has
a much higher chance of success — and getting books to children is clearly a
way where we can make that particular right thing both easy to do and fun to do
for parents and children.

We should make books easily available in affordable ways to every
family, day care, school, and even library in every community to help close the
learning gaps in our schools and to also reduce the number of people who will
end up in prison.

The Linkage Between Dropping Out and Going to
Jail Needs to Be Understood

The linkage between dropping out of high school and going to jail
needs to be understood. It is very real and it is significant.

We incarcerate more people than any other country in the world by
a large margin. We incarcerate seven times more people per capita than Canada,
and we overwhelming imprison people who have dropped out of school.

Because of the neuron connectivity processes that happen in the
first three years of life, we can actually now very sadly predict with a high
level of accuracy by age four in far too many communities, which children are
going to drop out of school and end up in jail.

We need to reduce the learning gaps and we also need to reduce the
number of people who go to prison and we can do both of those goals in very
functional and effective ways by making learning readiness by age four for all
of our children a top priority in every community.

We Need All of Our Caregivers and Educators to
Understand Those Processes and Timeframes

As a key foundational part of that strategy, we now need to very
intentionally and directly reach out now to both our caregivers and our
education professionals to get that information about those timeframes and those
basic biological processes to all of the right people in those fields and
professions.

This neuron connection process and time frame for each child is
new information for a surprising number of caregivers and for an even larger
percentage of educators.

Some of the old medical teachings and the old education policy
textbooks, beliefs and teachings that said that education begins at
kindergarten were painfully, dangerously, dysfunctionally, and truly damagingly
wrong, and we need to have both our educators and our caregivers knowing that new
science and data now.

We need every caregiver and every educator and every family to
know that very early time is a time when neurons connect by the billions and
even by the trillions for children based on the direct and individual
interactions each child has in those timeframes, and we need to have our,
families, schools, and communities use that information to help every child.

We also very much need people to know about the grim and sad
aspects of the four-year window of opportunity that exists for every child as
well.

We now clearly need everyone who cares about our children to know
that the hugely valuable and extremely useful process of making neuron
connections by the billions in the brain of each child slows and diminishes significantly
for each child at Age Four.

We obviously can, should and must still help each of our children
after age four. We should not ever give up on any child. We should figure out
ways of assessing which children have fallen behind and need more help and need
more support and we should do the things that can get that help and support to
all of those children.

Our top priority as a nation should be to have all of our children
learning ready at age four so we will have the smallest number of children in
the groups that need that extra and special support.

Our commitment as a nation should now be to help each child born
in America with the opportunity to create billions of neurons when that
magnificent opportunity to strengthen their brain is most directly relevant to
their life, and we should figure out how to do that now for each child.

The Process Could Not Be More Individual for
Each Child — It Is Not A Group Process

This process could not be more individual.

It is not based on race or gender or ethnicity or even income
levels.

It is not about groups at any level.

That learning readiness neuron connection process actually happens
in a very direct, very specific, very personal and very individual way for each
child.

We need to use that information to help children, one at a time,
when that opportunity exists for each child because it is an entirely
individual process.

We now also each have a moral and ethical obligation to teach that
information to everyone who has children in America because everyone who knows that
neuron connecting information and who has a new child can use it to help their
child and to change the life trajectory in positive ways for that child.

Every mother or father or family who knows those timeframes and
who knows that new science can use it in various ways to change and affect and
improve the life of each child in their family.

And the equally powerful and equally important negative reality is
that each and every family who does not know that information cannot use any of
the highly important brain development information that they do not know
themselves to give their children better lives and the sad truth and
unfortunate reality is that their children will be highly likely to have much
more difficult lives as a result of not getting that timely and direct support.

We should make it both a community goal in every community and a
national commitment to give the right support in those timeframes to every single
American child and we should make it a national priority to teach that science and
teach those approaches to every family and community in America.

We should all be very honest with ourselves and with each other
that the consequences of having too many children fall significantly behind and
both individually and collectively suffer the impact of being behind in key
areas will be devastating to our communities and to our nation.

The issue of having major and damaging gaps in learning between
our children has major relevance to our survival and to our internal Peace as a
nation., We all need to understand that the damage that will be done to us all
if we do not solve this problem now will be huge and potentially irreparable to
us as a nation. We need both the courage and the wisdom to understand what
those risks are to us as a nation if we do not address this issue now.

We Are Increasingly A Nation at War with
Itself

We are increasingly a nation at war with itself. We need to be
honest with ourselves about the situation we are in. Inter group anger exists
in multiple settings. Anger levels in this country are growing and that anger
is having an increasing impact on our communities and groups.

We need to be very honest with ourselves and we need to be very
open and collectively aware of the situation we are now in relative to basic,
powerful and often negative patterns of instinctive inter group behavior so that
we can deal with our inter group anger in each of our settings in effective and
intentional ways.

We are tribalizing in extremely dangerous ways as a country. That kind
of tribalization triggers very powerful and damaging sets of instincts and
thought processes that can guide us in very seductive ways to damaging
behaviors, emotions, values, and beliefs.

Instincts have great power over our thoughts and emotions.

We far too often actually change our ethical standards and then
change our ethical approaches in damaging and dangerous ways when that set of
instinct activation happens.

When the instinctive thoughts and the instinctive behaviors that
very consistently accompany tribalization in any setting in the world guide our
thinking, we can far too easily have a suspension of ethics. We also can actually
suspend morality and we often do not act in humane ways in several important areas
of our lives when those instincts are shaping our thoughts and emotions.

When those tribal instincts to divide the world into Us and Them
are activated, we have people angry with other people who want to damage the
people they perceive to be an enemy Them with no sense of guilt or remorse in
the context of those instinctive emotions, thought processes and beliefs.

When we divide the world into Us and Them and when we collectively
activate the instincts that support that thinking, we tend to distrust, hate, fear,
and want to defeat and damage whoever we perceive to be them.

We are seeing groups of people in our country now who are clearly
feeling those kinds of inter group tensions and inter group divisions. Both
thought processes and emotions are being triggered by that set of instinctive
interactions.

Those instinctive emotions and behaviors feel very right to each
of Us when they are activated — and that feeling of being right is what gives
them much of their power.

We know those sets of instincts well as a country.

Acting along instinctive inter group lines is not a new set of
behaviors for us as a nation.

Those same instinctive inter group behaviors and thought processes
have shaped major portions of our history as a country and they very clearly
and obviously currently shape major sections of the world we live in today. We
need to look at those settings and at our own history to see what that look
tells us about the risks we face here now.

We Need to Understand What All of Those
Conflicts Tell Us About Our Own Future Inter Group Interactions

We need to both see and understand those conflicts in all of those
settings — because they are very real and because they are clearly very current
modern human behaviors. We need to understand and fear the reality that similar
tribal behaviors and instincts can far too easily be triggered here and that
set of very seductive instincts can far too easily steer us as groups into
similarly destructive thoughts and behaviors.

Myanmar, Syria, Burma, and multiple other multi group countries
are showing us in real time today how dangerous those inter group tribal instincts
are. The patterns in all of those settings are universal, clear, sadly
consistent, highly predictable and entirely instinctive at their core.

The Rohingya are being expelled and massacred from land they have
occupied as a people since the 15th century as a permanent local minority. The
people killing and expelling them feel no guilt because the people hurting them
have been morally dehumanized in the intellectual construct of those sets of inter
group instinctive thoughts and instinct structured values and belief systems.

South Sudan has some horrible examples of comparable purely ethnic
cleansing going on with deep instinctive impact that have people being both
killed in large numbers, raped and abused, and driven from their homes by local
majority tribes in each setting.

The Kurds are facing some of the worst levels of instinctive inter
group values and inter group behaviors in multiple countries.

Kenya and The Central African Republic both have groups killing
each other as groups.

The same sets of inter group instincts are in place and shaping
how people think and act in each of those settings.

There are more than 125 of those kinds of conflicts going on in various settings today. Modern times have obviously not civilized us. Modern realities, technologies and science have made some changes in the level and kinds of weaponry that we use now to damage other people in some conflicted settings, but the core behaviors, values, and emotions that shape what people do in each inter group setting have not changed since our human history began.

In each setting, people in each of the groups define themselves to
be Us — and they then define the other groups in their setting at the most
basic level to be Them. Groups of people do horrible things to other people
perceived to be Them in all of those openly conflicted settings with clear negative
intentions toward whoever they feel right damaging as the result of those very
powerful and clearly activated instincts guiding their emotions, values, beliefs,
and behaviors.

Those examples of instinct guided and highly conflicted and
dangerous inter group behavior are included in this specific discussion about
the clear and direct need we have to provide early childhood support for all of
the children from all of the groups in our country because the truth is that
those inter group instincts and those instinct guided behaviors are very
relevant to us here as a nation.

We are feeling those primal potential instinctive differentiations
between groups as a possible divisive and damaging future for us — and the
truth also is that we need to do positive things now for each other to keep
those sets of seductive and powerful instincts from steering us into doing evil
things to each other at a collective level, here.

We can use our instincts to make us a great, safe, and enlightened
country rather than just another multitribal setting at war with itself. We can
steer ourselves to a wonderful future — and that steerage needs to start by
having us agree that we all want each other to be part of that wonderful
future.

We need proof points now for our collective good will.

Helping all of our children from every group get the right set of
supports on neuron connectivity in those first months and years of life can be very
clear and important proof points for our future — because we all love our
children and helping every child can be a key part of that set of positive
things and creating that very intentional and explicit help in effective ways for
all of our children can prove to us all that we actually do want us all to do
well as a people and as a nation.

There is no better proof of good intent than helping each of our
children.

We Clearly Have Had Our Own History Shaped by
Those Instincts

It would be foolish to deny that those instinct shaped inter group
behaviors are very relevant to us as a nation or a people.

We have clearly have not been immune from the impact of those fundamental
and too often entirely negative inter group us-them instincts in our own
country. We need to look clearly at our own history of inter group interactions
and we need to see it clearly for both what it is and for what it has been.

We need to look directly and clearly at the most negative aspects
of our own national history and we need to become very honest with ourselves
about those worst behaviors. We also need to appreciate and understand the significant
and the very positive opportunities that we have now as a nation and as a
people to give our children and grandchildren a future of safety, success, and
inter group Peace.

We Also Have Done Some Things Very Well and
That Creates Opportunity Now

We have done many things wrong — but we have also done many things
right and we need to build now very intentionally on that most positive part of
our historical foundation.

There are many wonderful things about our country that we need to
protect, preserve, and perpetuate, and we need to do that in very intentional
ways with a full and enlightened understanding of what we are doing.

We have had a wonderful steam of enlightened thinking in this
country about basic democratic principles and about universal rights for
humanity, and we have made slow but very directionally correct and positive progress
toward being a nation with equal rights for all of our people — regardless of
race, ethnicity, or gender.

We are still relatively unique in the world in some of those areas
of inter group acceptance and support. Increased diversity and expanded inclusion
between groups of people is not a goal of governments in very many other
settings in the world.

We Americans have been slowly but consistently becoming more
enlightened in our beliefs and behaviors, but we see more than a hundred other
settings in the world where the worst kinds of very basic and obvious inter
group instincts are creating conflict, anger, and ugly and damaging behaviors.

Those patterns are pretty predictable in any inter group setting when
we see them triggered.

History both repeats itself and rhymes. That is true because those
patterns exist in us all and because they play out with great consistency in
every conflicted inter group setting.

Our inter group instincts are shaped by our territorial,
hierarchical, culture building and acquisitional sets of instincts in most
settings, and we need to understand the entire package of instincts in order to
both know what we have done and to shape a better future based on creating true
and functional inter group Peace.

We see problematic behaviors that are led by people with their own
group and personal alpha instincts activated in a very wide range of settings who
intentionally and often very skillfully and effectively trigger and exacerbate
various kinds of inter group conflicts to enhance and increase their own alpha
status and power.

All of those instinct related forces and factors that deal with
Inter Group issues have the potential to put us at risk today in America.

Us-Them thinking has shaped who we are and what we do in a number
of ways for a very long time.

We have been a nation where the primary and most powerful Us group
since the late 1600s has been the blended White tribe that is actually an
amalgamation of all of the legacy European immigrants. Those particular highly
tribal European groups fought each other for centuries with clear intent and
strong inter group identity and inter group clarity in Europe — but their
descendants intermarried freely here and then created a new White Us core group
for our country.

That merged White group became the clear functional majority of
our population. That group activated all of the basic and universal patterns of
Us-Them instincts — and it defined their Us as being White and it defined each
other group in America who was not White as being Them in the context of those
basic instincts and interactions.

The key point to understand
is that being White defined our primary Us group as a nation at both an
instinctive level and a highly functional level for more than 300 years.

A major stream of behaviors that defined much of our history as a
country was that the White group felt and perceived its own very clear Us-Them instinctive
delineations against each of the other groups in the country that did not look
White, and passed laws for years that reflected those beliefs.

Our instincts cause us all to look for people who look like us and
who sound like us as a first indicator of who, in any setting, might actually
be us — and that basic delineation tool created and shaped our history for a
couple of centuries without us even suspecting that our instincts were shaping
our thoughts, emotions, values and beliefs at a very powerful level for all of
those issues and functions.

The
InterGroup books on instinctive behavior explain that history
and process– and also explain how our core set of values has changed in some important
and often enlightened ways over time that give us an opportunity now to rise to
another level as a country at this point in our history.

What we need to understand and recognize now is that “White”
Americans have filled a major Us role by being the majority of the population
of this country for more than three hundred years, and that group continues to
be the majority of our population today.

The Majority of Births This Year Will Be to
Minority Americans

However —

We need to understand very clearly what is happening to Us as a
nation right now on those issues and factors.

We need to understand the new developments in the context of our
instinctive behaviors.

We can never be free of instinctive behavior. No one can ever be
instinct free.

Each of us has basic sets of instincts that shape us as maternal,
territorial, hierarchical, inclusive and exclusive tribal and cultural
alignments, in very influential, powerful, and usually invisible ways.

We all feel instinctive loyalty to our culture and to our group — and
that set of instincts can be used to help us do enlightened and positive things
— and it can also lead us far too easily to behavior that can be, in its worst
manifestations, literally evil.

We need to understand that full set and package of influences — and
we need our intellect to use that package of instinctive behaviors in very intentional
and enlightened ways to help us have a wonderful future as a nation and a
people.

To do that, we need to be very clear about the fact that the long-standing
majority status and role for our White American group is now changing.

The numbers are not debatable.

We just reached the point in our history where the actual
numerical majority of births in America this year will be, for the first time
ever, from our various minority populations.

White Americans are no longer the majority of births in America.

There are several minority groups that now have, in total, a
majority of births — and our Hispanic births will be the single largest
component of all new infants born in America this year.

That is a permanent change.

There is no possible scenario that will have the White subset of
our population be the permanent majority of births in this country into our
nation’s distant future.

The prior historical ability of the legacy White tribe to maintain
easy and basic control as a group over the direction of the country based purely
on relative population size is clearly changing and it is changing very rapidly.

That change now creates a major opportunity for us that we need to
address, if we want to continue to succeed as a country, and if we want all of
our groups to have successful futures.

It is absolutely clear that we will need as a nation to come up
with an more inclusive set of governing approaches that includes all groups of
Americans if we want to continue to be the most successful country on the
planet and if we functionally want to have all of our people prosper and thrive.

We need to build a new American Us — and we need to create the new
Us based on our shared values and our shared beliefs and not on our shared race
or our shared ethnicity.

We can do that and we can actually have everyone win when we all help
each other win.

We can easily continue to be the best, most successful, safest,
and most powerful nation on the planet if we understand exactly what we are
doing and if we do the right things now to make that happen.

We need to make our diversity into a huge asset. We need to take
advantage of the great synergy that results from an aligned and reinforcing set
of inputs and support from all of the groups who are part of our nation — and
that synergy can make us both extremely interesting and collectively great.

We need to start by each of us deciding, understanding and
believing that we all will be much happier when we all know and believe that
our children and grandchildren will be both successful and safe for the lives
they will lead if we do key things now to make that future happen.

We Need A Strategy of Win-Win for All Groups
Instead of Win-Lose or Lose-Lose

The risk and danger of us going to war with ourselves are both
very real if we do not give people from all groups the very believable sense and
belief that we collectively actually do want us all to Win.

We also need the people from our groups who are being drawn into
tribal thinking and divisive behavior today to be able to set aside that highly
seductive tribal conflict approach in favor of becoming an American Us.

We need to very intentionally and knowingly do the right things
now that will create inter group Peace for our future.

Our future begins now.

Therefore —

We need to commit to inter group Peace now and we need to do the
right things now to make inter group Peace happen and thrive.

We are blessed with a great set of both functional and enlightened
values that we can use to anchor that process.

We need inter group Peace now that is based on our shared beliefs
and our shared values, rather than on our specific ethnicities or our separate races.
We need to appreciate and even enjoy and celebrate the fact that our separate
ethnicities and races can make us safer and both more interesting and more
successful when we share commitments and when we do want each other to win.

We can do that internally aligning work, and we can become a
nation that is stronger and safer based on our shared beliefs, because we do have
a wonderful set of core values that can give our grandchildren a wonderful and
successful world.

Our core values are enlightened and powerful and magnificent in
their acceptance and blending of our best beliefs.

We will all need to work in aligned and very intentional inter
group and inter individual ways to make obvious, intentional and clear success as
a values-driven Us happen.

The InterGroup books have chapters that outline the values we have
been using as a nation to give us our best context for who we are. We need to
make those values clear and explicit to unite us and guide us — and we
need to show each other our good intentions relative to having a win-win future
for every group and then doing things collectively to make that win-win future
happen.

We clearly need to do things together to both prove our collective
good will and to help every group prosper.

We Need to Help Every Child to Prove That We
Want Us All to Win

Our children are the single most important component of that
approach and strategy.

We need to help every child.

This piece about brain development in our children in the first
years of life actually started with that premise as a foundation for inter
group Peace in America.

We know that we have massive learning gaps in our schools. We have
major school systems where barely 20 of the students can read at grade level — and
we have settings where large numbers of children cannot read at all.

We need to have people not to blame the schools or teachers for
those failures and we need everyone in our communities to understand the basic
fact that the work to close those learning gaps in kindergarten and in our high
schools has failed for 30 years because the actual neuron connections in the
brain that close those learning gaps need to be made at 5 months for each child
and they cannot be made in the brain of any child when the children are 15 years
old.

We Need to Build Neurons for Peace

Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, the University of Washington, and a
number of other great academic programs have all now shown us the massive
impact of those first years and even months of life on our children’s brains — and
we need to use that exploding body of extremely useful science to help every
child with the right support in those key times.

Dr.
Beatrice Beebe and her team at Columbia University have
shown that the first 100 days of life are extremely important. This is highly
useful science about the first weeks and months of life. They have shown that
you can analyze the status of a child at 100 days old and you can predict with
extreme accuracy which children will be facing learning challenges at three
years old and five years old.

The Columbia team also showed that you can intervene and save just
about every child who is behind in those ways at that point in time.

So we now have a much higher level of understanding of the
lifelong impact on each child of the interactions each child has in those time
frames and we now know that we need to use that new knowledge to change the
learning gaps in our schools.

We need to change the learning readiness level of children before
age four in order to succeed in eliminating those gaps — and that means that we
need to develop both a national commitment and a national strategy to achieve
those goals.

We Need to Make Learning Readiness for Every
Child at Age Four A National Priority

We need to make learning readiness levels for every child at age four
a major national priority and we need to make improving age four learning
readiness levels for all children a priority for every community in our country
and we need to do that all in clear and evident good faith in very visible and
credible ways as proof to each other of our collective commitment to have every
group of Americans do well and succeed.

We have a great opportunity to help every child because for the
first time ever, more than half of the births in America this year will be
covered by Medicaid.

We are blessed with having a set of tools we can use to help
achieve those goals that we can simply decide to use as a basic strategy and
overarching plan for the country. We do not need to invent links to the births
of America. We have direct links now that we can repurpose with relative ease
to help build neuron links in our children.

Our Medicaid program gives us a very direct link with the highest
impact mothers today.

We learned a couple of years ago, that the vast majority of
Medicaid mothers did not know they could strengthen the brain of their child
with exercise in the first months and years of life, and we learned that most
mothers in our country did not know that neuron connections happened by the
billions in their child when they talked directly to their child and when they read
to their child.

Every mother in America deserves to know that information, and we
can now make the national decision to have Medicaid teach it to every mother, beginning
with the obstetricians who care for the mother before and during the birth. Obstetricians
are highly credible with their patients — and the time just before birth is a
perfect time to explain to the mother to be that reading to a child and talking
to a child immediately builds neuron connections that last for life.

We also need our Medicaid Pediatricians and Medicaid family
doctors and Medicaid nurses and other caregivers to teach that information to
every new mother and family.

Medicaid needs to insist that every member of the care team is teaching
that information to families and supporting that process for every child.

Most Medicaid mothers currently interact with the WIC program for
food and nourishment issues and support.

The Medicaid program has multiple effective tools. We have nurse
family partnership programs that do great work today and spend relatively
little money doing it. That partnership team can be enlarged to help more
mothers in those first months and years. We now also very much need those
nurses to be sure to include brain development in their coaching processes.

Early Head Start — that begins often at birth — can also help us
achieve that learning readiness by four goal for many children, and it can be
expanded relatively easily in many settings.

We can achieve the goal of helping every child. We actually have
both opportunity through Medicaid and through other currently available tools that
are in existence today to help every family and child.

We have not used those tools in intentional ways to create
learning readiness for our children — and we need to change that behavior and we
need to use those tools in explicit and intentional ways immediately to help
every child from every group get the needed start to be ready to learn when
they get to school.

The highest impact and single most effective thing that we can do
to keep Americans out of prison is to help in those first high leverage weeks
to interact with each child to keep them from dropping out of school.

That pattern of not being able to read and ending up in jail has
been recorded in several other countries. That incarceration situation that
relates to learning readiness levels at age four for each child is not unique
to our country. Other countries have similar patterns and they have those
patterns for similar reasons.

More than 60 percent of the prisoners in English jails also cannot
read.

Those patterns make sense in all of those countries and in our own
— because people who drop out of school and who cannot read tend to find crime
a possible source of resources in every setting — without the prison outcome necessarily
having a link to race or ethnicity in those settings.

The single most effective thing we can do to reduce the number of
people from every group in America who go to prison is to have neuron
connectivity succeed for all of the children who are born in America before
they are four years old.

We need to decide to commit to our shared values in a way that
gives us all Peace of Mind that we are, in fact, an America brought together by
our beliefs and not by other alignments.

We need to want people from all groups to prosper and we want win-win
results for every group. To make that possible, we need all children to have
the same opportunities to connect the neurons in their brains in the first
months and years of life, so that the economic opportunities that exist as we
move toward more inclusion in the work force can be realized by more people.

We Should Create A Peace Movement — and We
Should Start with Honestly Helping All of Our Children

We are a very wealthy and capable country. We can help every child
and we can begin to do it immediately.

We have enough money to give the right start to every kid and we
have the tools that can be easily linked to our Medicaid programs to make that
happen if we ask every Medicaid program in every state to make learning
readiness by age four a program priority.

We need every school system in America to make learning readiness
by age four a top priority. Please. Help with that process. Give this piece to
every school board member you know and ask them for their personal and direct
support. Teach it to as many educators as you can as quickly as you can. Schools
are very tired and many school systems and their teams are disheartened based
on their decades of failure in closing those gaps in their schools, and they
really need this information to deal with these issues going forward.

We need to decide that we want a future of inter group Peace for
America — and we should anchor that Peace by having all groups do well and by
helping every child in America get the right start on building neuron
connections by the billions and trillions in those first days, weeks, months,
and years of life when those processes happen for each child.

Never let a great opportunity go to waste.

Peace.

Our children and grandchildren will think much more highly of us
in twenty and thirty years if we do the right things now to allow them to live
in Peace and not become just another country awash in inter group anger,
conflict, and fear.

We get to choose the path we will go down for both inter group interactions
and neuron strength in our children.

Let’s choose well, and let’s build trillions of neuron connections
in millions of brains because it is actually possible to do and because it
needs to be done as soon as we can do it for both our children and our nation.